Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska

Praise for Eagle Blue

D'Orso ultimately weaves a mostly beautiful Arctic tapestry as he shadows the team from its first day of practice through all 28 regular and post-season games, offering a play-by-play not only on the Eagles' season but also on locally relevant political, social and community issues: Arctic drilling, alcoholism, generational conflicts and, certainly relevant to the Eagles, financial struggles.—San Francisco Chronicle

Riveting and thrilling.—Portland Tribune

D'Orso is brilliant in detailing their fight both on and off the court. —Denver Post

By the end . . . you'll be rooting for the team to advance to state, for the next shot to fall, for the ball to bounce right for Eagle Blue. —Seattle Times

D'Orso's chronicle of a season spent following a high-school basketball team in Fort Yukon, Alaska, prompts the realization that, in terms of hoops mania, the Alaskan bush could be the new Indiana.—Booklist (Top Ten Sports Books of 2006)

In a harsh place where rivers freeze routinely and daytime disappears for months on end, you expect wolverines and ancient spirits and caribou and permafrost, but what you don't expect are the high hopes Michael D'Orso documents in his gripping and memorable account of a group of native Alaskan kids who love basketball and who would neither take no for an answer nor accept obscurity as a fate.—Madeleine Blais, author of the national bestseller In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

"Michael D'Orso paints a memorable portrait of each player and many of the townspeople. D'Orso also brings to life the team's coach, Dave Bridges . . . And without resorting to hackneyed language or playing on emotions, D'Orso demonstrates the truth of the sports cliche that you don't always have to win to be a winner. Eagle Blue is a compelling, well-told story by someone who sees beyond immediate events to the fundamental truths they illustrate."—Virginian-Pilot

A pleasure from start to finish.—Arizona Republic

Michael D'Orso . . . pens a powerful account of the 2004 basketball season in Alaska experienced by the Fort Yukon Eagles, a successful high school team of tribal youth that is the pride of the remote community.—Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon)

With honesty and affection, D'Orso describes a season that lasts four months, covers 4,000 miles and ends at the state championship tournament. We won't tell you the outcome, but it doesn't matter. The Fort Yukon boys were winners from the start.—Wichita Eagle

"A vivid, compassionate portrait of modern Native life combined with an edge-of-your-seat sports thriller. In Eagle Blue, Michael D'Orso delivers championship stuff."—Daniel Coyle, author of Hardball and the New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong's War

"Eagle Blue is full of heroes and heart. Michael D'Orso tells the story of a basketball team that holds together a town, and the town that holds together a team. These are modern-day Arctic warriors fighting for far more than points on a scoreboard."—Tom Bodett, author, radio commentator, and longtime Alaskan

EAGLE BLUE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption

of a Town Called Rosewood

Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the

Galapagos Islands

Pumping Granite

Fast Takes

AS A COAUTHOR

Somerset Homecoming

The Cost of Courage

For the Children

Rise and Walk

Thin Is Just a Four-Letter Word

Winning with Integrity

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

Body for Life

In Praise of Public Life

Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the

Two Years That Changed America Forever

EAGLE BLUE

A TEAM, A TRIBE,

AND A HIGH SCHOOL

BASKETBALL SEASON

IN ARCTIC ALASKA

Michael D'Orso

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright © 2006 by Michael D'Orso

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Lyrics from Anthem of the American Indian, by Tom Bee, copyright 1973 by Jobete Music Co. Inc., reprinted by permission (the SOAR Corporation).

Excerpt from Northwest Passage, © 1942 TIME Inc., reprinted by permission.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

D'Orso, Michael.

Eagle blue : a team, a tribe, and a high school basketball season in Arctic Alaska / Michael D'Orso.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-772-9

1. Fort Yukon School (Fort Yukon, Alaska)—Basketball—History. 2. Fort Yukon Eagles (Basketball team)—History. 3. Basketball—Alaska—Fort Yukon—History. 4. Basketball—Tournaments—Alaska—History. 5. Basketball players—Alaska—Biography. 6. Fort Yukon (Alaska )—History. I. Title.

GV885.72. A4D67 2006

796.323'62097986 —DC22

2005025430

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury in 2006

This paperback edition published in 2007

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, Scotland

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Spring 2004

PART ONE: PRESEASON

One: Dave

Two: Matt

Three: Paul

Four: First Practice

Five: The School

Six: Dave and Diane

Seven: Scrimmage

PART TWO: THE SEASON

Eight: New Year

Nine: Opener

Ten: The Road

Eleven: The Russians

Twelve: NIT

Thirteen: Home Stand

Fourteen: Tanana

Fifteen: Tok

Sixteen: Payback

PART THREE: POSTSEASON

Seventeen: Regionals

Eighteen: State

EPILOGUE

Spring 2005

Afterword

Notes, Sources and Acknowledgments

FORT YUKON BOYS BASKETBALL TEAM

PEOPLE OF FORT YUKON

Adlai Alexander (Village Chief)

Dacho Alexander (Vocational Education instructor)

Dave Bridges (Boys basketball coach)

Diane Bridges (Dave's wife)

Cheryl Cadzow (Girls basketball coach)

Earl Cadzow (Cheryl's husband)

Clifton Cadzow (Josh's father)

Jay Cadzow (Earl's and Clifton's brother)

Mandy Cadzow (Girls basketball team star, Cheryl's daughter)

Jerry Carroll (Zach's and Derek's father)

Georgie Engler (School secretary, Chris's mother)

Willie Fields (Tim's father)

Delbert Doc Lantz (School principal)

Deb McCarty (Clinic director, Aaron Carroll's aunt)

Brian Rozell (Teacher)

Paul Shewfelt (Matt's uncle)

Jack Shewfelt (Matt's father)

Ryan Shewfelt (Matt's brother)

John Shewfelt (Matt's brother)

Gina Shewfelt (Matt's sister)

Anthony Shewfelt (Paul's son)

Trader Dan Teague (Storekeeper)

PROLOGUE

Spring 2004

THE BOY STANDS alone by the door of the cabin, in the radiant warmth of the bright Arctic sun. Strewn in the mud at his feet are the heads of a half-dozen mallards, their eyes gazing skyward, their scalps slick with blood, their necks hacked clean through.

He's been at it an hour now, at a small makeshift table, plucking and gutting and wielding his blade in the sharp April light. His cousins, the young ones, are heaving a ball at the hoop by the road. The backboard is battered, the rim bent and twisted. The torn netting flaps in the afternoon breeze.

From within the log walls of the cabin comes music—singing, a bass line, the thumping of drums. His father's old music. Hard rock. The boy's white high-topped Reeboks, spattered with offal, keep time with the rhythm as he slices the meat.

A jersey hangs loose from his thin, bony shoulders. The name on the back is a name the boy worships. Iverson. Number 3. The Answer is what they call Iverson, and sometimes, when he's sleeping, the boy imagines that he is the Answer himself. The crossover dribble, the lookaway feed, the thunderous roar of an NBA crowd—they belong to the boy, in the night, in his dreams.

But then he awakes, and he's still here, in the village, his People around him but nobody else, not one human soul for as far as the eye can see, and the eye can see so very far out here on the Flats.

Now, the Elders would differ. There are souls everywhere, say the old men and women, and not just the souls of the People alone. In the stands of white spruce and willow that circle the village. In the silvery shoals of the Porcupine River. Up the snow-quilted ridges that rise to the west, where the lynx and the fox and the wolf roam the woods. To the north, on the plains where the caribou graze by the dozens of thousands and the killing is good when the migration begins. And down there, to the south, where the pond-speckled Flats are laid out like a rug to the gleaming horizon, to the ice-packed foothills of the sparkling White Mountains.

There are souls all around, say the Elders. There are Spirits. In the earth, in the air, in the blood that still runs through the veins of the People.

The boy wants so much to believe them, to know that it's true. But it's hard to hear tales of the ancients on foot, with their sleds and their spears and their tents on their backs, braving sixty-below in the dead of the winter, bringing down bears with their wits and their hands. It's hard for the boy to hear stories like those, then to look at the men of the village today. There are some who still run their traplines the time-honored way, tracing the trails of their fathers through silent white forests with trained teams of huskies and hand-fashioned sleds. But the rest of the tribe, those who still call themselves woodsmen, saddle sleek snow-machines powered by NASCAR-grade engines, fiberglass beasts that blast over the ice at the speed of a Lexus.

The boy thinks of the stars and the wind that showed the way home when the Elders were young, then he looks at these men—the friends of his father—with their GPS bearings and satellite cell phones with signals that slice through the worst winter storm, and he asks himself: Where are the Spirits in any of this? He asks it while watching the men in the village who no longer run traplines at all, who no longer hunt moose in the fall or net salmon come summer. He looks at the husbands and fathers and brothers with pints in their pockets and dope on their breath, slumped on the stoops of their worn, weathered shacks. He can feel their surrender, soaked in whiskey and weed. He can feel their confusion, one foot in the old world, the world of the Elders, and one foot in the new, the world of the white man, with food wrapped in plastic, and color TVs, and lawyers and judges and government checks.

Trapped. That's the sense the boy sees has enveloped his People. Trapped like a wolverine locked in the jaws of a number two set, sinking its teeth through its own flesh and sinew in its rage to get free. There is nothing, they say, like a trapped wolverine, thrashing the limbs off the trees that surround it, shrieking in pain and at the loss of its freedom. But there's no breaking free. And it finally tires, slumping down in the snow, exhausted, defeated, numb, nearly dead.

The boy looks around at the men and the women and too many children his own age and younger who drink themselves witless, who lash out in anguish at their friends, at themselves. He can feel it, the fog of that pain and despair. But he keeps his eyes down, moves ahead, does his work, splits the wood for the drum stove that warms this small cabin, heats a snack for himself when he gets home from school, trims the meat that his father and brothers will share when they come home tonight. And he doesn't waste time on thoughts of the future, of where all this will lead. He's seen what such thoughts have done to his brother John, who's consumed by an anger that eats him alive. John watches the people in charge of this village, the dopeheads and addicts scattered among them, who forsake their neighbors for their own narrow needs.

John knows who they are, how they scheme to hold on to their slivers of power, how they funnel the money that flows in from outside, and how some like to spend it, on cocaine and grass hidden in freight on the airplanes that fly up each morning from Fairbanks. John knows who's selling and buying, for how much and how often. He knows because he did his share of all that, back before he found Christ. Thank god for Jesus, says John, and thank god for the music, the one thing John clings to that offers him hope. His band, Native Pride, has scored paying gigs as far south as Fairbanks, as far southeast as Dawson, as far downriver as Nulato, where the crowds at the dances raise their bottles and beer cans to these Fort Yukon boys with their guitars and drums and their covers of Creedence and the Doors and the Stones. John's got dreams of his own, of music school somewhere Outside, beyond Alaska, someplace like Juilliard, maybe. He's got a brochure from Juilliard, dog-eared from handling, stashed in a drawer in the back of the cabin he shares with his girlfriend, Samantha. But those dreams are on hold now—the music, a college, his notions of turning this village around. Because Samantha is pregnant. She found out just last month. She's due in December, so John's got to find cash-paying work, make the money he'll need to take care of this child. But cash-paying work is not easy to come by, not here in the village. Loading trash. Hauling sewage. Mopping the floors at the Fort Yukon School. This is the work that one finds in the village, and these jobs are taken. Moving to Fairbanks is always an option, but that would mean leaving this world for the world of the white man. It may come to that, as it has for so many. But for now John is staying.

The boy has watched what the lostness is doing to John. He's watched what it's doing to Ryan as well, the oldest of all of them, the number one son. There was a time, not long ago, when Ryan was the pride of the village, the heart and the soul of the Fort Yukon Eagles. He could run like the wind, scored like a machine, out rebounded boys who were half a foot taller. But those days are gone, and now Ryan is just like so many in this town—an ex-player who lives for the night pickup games at the gym, still running the court like the star he once was. And when the gym's empty, he sits on a stoop like the others, or holes up in his cabin, stoned and wet-eyed, like them. Like them, he sometimes turns dark when the liquor takes hold, punching out at whatever might get in his way. Just this past Friday night someone in the village attacked the school's windows, shattering forty-two of the custom-made, double-paned, winterproof sheets of glass. Word is repairs will run thirty-five thousand dollars, more than most villagers make in four years. The town's three-man police force has been out all morning, knocking on doors, taking notes, asking questions. In a town of six hundred, it's not hard to find answers. News travels fast, door to door, phone to phone. The word by this morning was the cops in their red SUV were looking for Ryan, among others.

The boy hasn't seen Ryan since yesterday evening. He hasn't seen anyone since he woke up today. His father took off before dawn with his buddy, Mike Peter, out to one of Mike's duck blinds upriver, toward Circle. The shooting was good, and so was the drinking, by the sound of the laughter and man-to-man cursing as the two friends dropped off their kill sometime late this morning, while the boy was still curled in his bed.

He's not sure where they are now, his old man and Mike. Soon half the homes in the village will be empty and padlocked, the People moving upstream to their riverside fish camps, where they'll sleep in their huts and their tents for the next five or six weeks, tending their fish wheels for salmon and grayling, slicing and cleaning and stringing their catch from lines hung between trees, the smoke from their smudge fires turning back the mosquitoes as they sit by the swift-flowing Yukon and tell jokes or share stories or just bask in the glow of the warm midnight sun.

There are some who go south, for the work down in Fairbanks, construction jobs mostly, filling their pockets with seasonal cash before autumn arrives and freezeup begins and the outside jobs stop as the white world moves indoors. August, September—that's when the People return from the city and come home from the fish camps to hunt moose for the winter, store their salmon in caches, haul from the forest wood that they'll saw, split and stack to the roofs of their cabins to keep themselves warm in the dark months to come.

That's the time of the year the boy lives for, the dark months, when the rivers freeze solid and the landscape turns white and the gym opens each evening and the practices start, then the season begins, and the school's ice-crusted parking lot fills Friday nights with snow-gos and pickups, and the gym's three rows of bleachers are jammed with the townspeople, some who chant Gwich'in, the tongue of the Tribe, and the boy leads his teammates out onto the floor in their blue satin warm-ups and their white Nike headbands, while the Tanana Wolves or the Minto Lakers or the Tok Wolverines warm up at the visitors' end of the court, and the radio play-by-play man, the boy's uncle Paul, sits at a rough wooden table broadcasting the game on a five-watt transmitter, beaming its signal out into the clear Arctic night, out over the Flats, into clusters of cabins in hamlets like Chalkyitsik and Birch Creek and Beaver, places that make Fort Yukon look like a city.

Last season was magic, the boy draining three-pointers, and John leading the feverish press with his lightning-quick hands, and the six-foot-two kid, Aaron Carroll, the sophomore, starting out clumsy, hardly able to run up the court without tripping. But by midseason Aaron was no longer stumbling, and by March the big kid was posting down low like a pro. No one expected the Eagles to do much, but something began clicking, and they started to roll. Then came the Regionals, which Fort Yukon had won five years in a row. No one gave them a chance to do it a sixth, not with a record of more losses than wins. But when the State Tournament opened in Anchorage, with eight Regional champions left in Alaska from the sixty-one Class I A teams that started the season, the Eagles were among them, unranked but still kicking.

When they won their first game, edging the Noatak Lynx, the village took notice, some stepping outside to shoot guns in the air. And when they took out the Aniak Halfbreeds in the semis, the eight boys from Fort Yukon awoke the next morning to see their names in large print in the Anchorage papers, the first time a Fort Yukon team had made it that far since the school's fabled squad back in '76, the one the boy's uncle Paul played on.

They lost that night in the finals to Wainwright, from up north near Barrow, but even that loss could not dim the luster of what this team had achieved. Both the boy and his brother were named All-Tournament. The boy was named first team All-State, something no one from Fort Yukon had ever achieved. The runner-up trophy the team carried home to the village was the most elegant anyone there had ever laid eyes on.

That was all just last month. Now it's over for John, nothing ahead but those long hollow nights in the dead of the winter, when the boys' practice is finished, and the town's men take the floor in that small, dingy gym, running full court in work pants and T-shirts and ball caps turned backward, some still wearing their jackets and heavy snow boots, replaying the days when those white satin jerseys with royal blue numbers were theirs.

The rumors have already started again, as they do at the end of each season up here. Is Coach Bridges quitting, or will he be back? Like the young wide-eyed teachers who fly up each fall from Wisconsin or Texas, who find more than they bargained for here in the Arctic and fly back south for good when the school year is over, or turn tail even sooner than that, around Christmas, taking off without notice, leaving ungraded papers stacked high on a table, the dishes from their last meal still piled unwashed in the sink—just like a good teacher, a good basketball coach in the bush is a hard thing to find and even harder to count on for more than one year.

Every spring the rumor mill kicks in again. Will Coach Bridges be back? Coach Bridges does nothing to stem the confusion. Truth is he seems to enjoy it, to keep everyone guessing, wondering if this is the year he'll decide to retire. The seven seasons he's put in now are already more than any coach the town's had since that gym was first built back in '71, the only gymnasium the town of Fort Yukon has ever had.

The boy thinks of all this as he trims the plump meat in the warm April sun, meat that will become tonight's dinner, a pot of duck soup rich with juices and fat. He thinks of his brothers. His father. His teammates. The Elders. The coach. Most of all, he thinks of next season, when he'll be the captain, the senior they count on, the hopes of the village carried on his slim back.

The boy welcomes that burden. He wants it. He wishes the season was starting tomorrow.

The ball bounces toward him from the kids by the hoop. It rolls into the wet mess that has pooled at his feet. He sets down his knife, his hands dripping with blood, bends and picks up the ball and takes aim at the basket.

The shot bangs off the rim, caroms into the road. The kids scurry to chase it. The boy shrugs, picks up his knife, turns back to the meat, and his thoughts, and his dreams of the season that's just eight months away.

PART ONE

Preseason

ONE

Dave

THE FIRST OF November, almost a week since the Sox won the Series, and Dave Bridges still can't wipe that grin off his face. It's his birthday today, his fifty-first, but that's not why he's smiling. The door to his hutch of an office is festooned with photos of Pedro and Manny, of Damon and Schilling, the hugging and weeping that swept across Boston, the sweet taste of redemption that only someone who grew up in New England could possibly fathom, much less feel. They're showing highlights on ESPN, and Bridges is soaking it in, the sound muted on the little TV he keeps in a corner as he files a form for some outgoing freight.

He hears the faint drone of an approaching aircraft. The late-morning Wright Airlines flight up from Fairbanks. He grabs his work gloves and hunts for his hat. Winter won't be here for seven more weeks, but the temperature's already dipped below zero and the limbs of the spruce trees that circle the airstrip are thick with a coating of soft autumn snow.

Bridges zips up his Carhartts, all weathered and ragged and torn at both knees. His wife, Diane, shakes her head whenever she sees them, says they make him look like he's homeless, asks him why not buy new ones. Bridges just smiles. Why waste money on new overalls when these are just fine? They're warm, and they're sturdy, and who cares how they look? He knows it sounds corny, but his Carhartts are like a dependable friend, same as that beat-up Ford van parked out front, the junkheap he picked up for 450 bucks at a school district auction some five years ago. Sure, the thing looks like a wreck, dented and rusted, cracks in the windshield, a paint job the shade of a jar of cheap mustard. But it gets the job done, just like the Carhartts. And what Bridges likes best is there's not one thing phony about either of them.

A knock at the door, and an old man shuffles in. Bridges has never seen him before. He's Native, probably visiting family or friends in the village. The old man says he'd like a seat on that plane coming in, says he needs to get over to Birch Creek. He fishes a torn, wrinkled check from his coat pocket, hands it to Bridges and asks, Is that enough?

Bridges studies the worn piece of paper, a government check for seventy-five dollars. He adjusts his eyeglasses, touches his mustache with the tip of a finger, glances back at the man. He prefers not to hassle with two-party checks, but in this case he says it's okay. Something about the old man's eyes tells Bridges he can trust him. Not like the woman who pokes her head in the office a few seconds later. She's Native, too. Her breath smells of bourbon. She talks fast and too loud. She says she's left some packages on a bench in the terminal's front waiting room. Says she has to run uptown for a couple of minutes, asks Bridges to keep an eye on her stuff till she gets back. Bridges picks up his keys, says nothing to the woman, who leaves as abruptly as she appeared.

A couple of minutes? he says, shaking his head and pulling his office door shut. "Who is she kidding? Don't pee down my back and tell me it's raining."

He walks into the front room—the lobby, as outsiders might call it, the tourists who show up every couple of weeks, often doing no more than step out onto the ice of the runway to pose for each other, snapping some photos to prove they were actually here, above the honest-to-god Arctic Circle, then hurrying back to their seats on the plane, huffing and rubbing their hands to get warm. The more daring among them might actually climb off until the next flight, make their way into the village, ask where they can get a hot cup of coffee and learn that there's no place in Fort Yukon that sells coffee like that, no place that sells anything hot to drink or to eat besides Cheryl's Cafe, which is down toward the river. But good luck finding Cheryl's unless someone shows you the way, past the school and the town's old Episcopal church, through the woods, up a couple of snowmachine trails, beyond Kevin Solomon's place with its yard full of dogs and its outhouse a couple of steps from the door. Take a left just past Kevin's, where the trail bends toward the banks of the Yukon, another hard left and you're there, at the green clapboard house with a satellite dish the size of a Volkswagen perched on its roof. Cheryl will fry you a burger on her countertop grill—the same plug-in kind they sell on TV—or she'll fix you some chicken fingers and fries. She's got cold cans of soda she keeps in the fridge. You can sit at your choice of two tables, unless Cheryl's kids are doing their homework at one. If your timing is right, her husband, Earl, might spoon you a bowl of his homemade moose soup or give you a piece of some dried caribou. And, yes, she has coffee, though it's not on the menu.

The old man takes a seat in a hard straight-back chair by the window, scanning the gray late-morning sky for that incoming plane. Another man slumps on a bench by the door. His eyes are shut, his jaw stub-bled, unshaven, his hair dirty and matted, his coat held together by swaths of duct tape. He hears Bridges walk into the room, turns his head toward the sound. He grunts, gathers his thoughts. His tongue is heavy, his words slurred by liquor.

What . . . time . . . does the plane . . . leave for . . . Chalkyitsik?

Kenny, says Bridges, I've told you three times now. It doesn't get here till one thirty. It won't leave till about one forty-five. And if you're not sobered up by then, you ain't getting on it.

The man's chin drops back down to his chest. Bridges has known Kenny for more than two decades, all the way back to when Bridges taught school in Chalkyitsik. Kenny was a nonstop drinker back then, and little has changed. He stunned Bridges one summer, showing up unannounced at the wedding of Bridges's big sister, in Maine. This was back in the pipeline boom days, when money was flowing like oil up here, and Kenny got a wild hair to surprise his friend Dave. No question it was a surprise. Kenny showed up with the best of intentions, but promptly got plastered. He was still three sheets to the wind when the weekend was over and Bridges was packing his truck for the drive back to Fairbanks. How could he not offer Kenny a lift? They didn't get far, though, before Bridges could see that this just wouldn't work. Kenny couldn't stop drinking, and when he drank, more often than not it turned ugly. Bridges finally dropped him off on the roadside just past Montreal. To this day he's not sure exactly how Kenny got home. He figures he must've just stuck out his thumb till he made it clear across Canada to Whitehorse, then up the Alaska Highway to Fairbanks, some 3,500 road miles in all. Then the last leg, of course, as always, by air, with a stop in Fort Yukon, then on to Chalkyitsik. However he did it, Kenny's still here some twenty years later, still drinking, still flying, still finding his way home.

Kenny turns to the old man, asks if he'd give him a dollar for a drink from the soda machine. The old man looks at Kenny, turns and gazes back out the window. The old man is Native, like Kenny, but that's where the bond ends. It's Natives like Kenny who give the old man a bad name. In the eyes of the white people living downstate—not all the whites, certainly, but more than a few—those sad, sorry drunks stumbling out of the bars on Two Street in Fairbanks or Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, passing out on park benches, panhandling passersby for spare change or a cigarette, they're all just alike. Savages. Hopeless. Better off back in their villages where they belong.

The old man wears a ball cap with the legend NATIVE PRIDE stitched on the crown. Eskimos, Athabascans, Yupiks, Aleuts—Natives all over Alaska wear those words on their shirts and their hats and their jackets. For some, the words mean very little. For others, like the old man, they are holy. They're righteous. And they're slandered each time a Native man is arrested for beating his wife. Or the wife goes to prison for knifing her husband. Or someone like Kenny shows up like this.

Bridges stops for a second to check his geraniums. They're under a grow light, on a table set up by the door to the bathroom—two rows of clay pots aligned like sentries. Come next May they'll be ready to put in the ground, along with the cabbage and carrots and onions, and nasturtiums and marigolds, impatiens and snapdragons and whatever else Bridges might find a good deal on at the greenhouse sales they throw every April in Fairbanks. The small yard surrounding his cabin, just up the road from the airport, is bare at the moment, bone-white with its blanket of snow. By the end of the winter that blanket will be close to four feet deep, maybe five. Then, come late spring, the melt will begin, the ice in the river will break, the sounds of its bucking and heaving resounding like dynamite throughout the village, and Bridges's front yard will explode with the colors and blossoms and tendrils of spring.

His bees will arrive about that same time, the two boxes he orders each year from a dealer in Fairbanks, who buys them himself from a bee farm in California. They come about five thousand bees per container, each container roughly the size of a shoebox. It's like Christmas for Bridges, the day those boxes show up. He loves the exquisite ritual of it all, preparing the two hives he keeps in his yard, each with its broad wooden platform and fitted tin top and interior network of brood rooms and frames. He loves fishing out the lone queen in each of those boxes, each queen encased in a small plastic bulb. He soaks the queens down so they won't fly away, then places each one into her hive, where the other bees follow—the workers and drones. Then he sets up a chair just outside his back door, where he sits every day after work, through the spring and the summer, mesmerized by the show. Who needs TV, he asks, when you've got something like this? The worker bees hovering over the garden, floating off toward the blossoms in the shade of the forest, feeding on willow and lupine and the purple-red fireweed that bursts up from the ground in the warm July sun. And the drones, coming and going with nothing to do but have sex with the queen. He never gets tired of watching the bees flying back to their hives so laden with pollen and nectar they can hardly stay airborne, banging smack into the fronts of their boxes, where they fall to the platforms by the dozens, stunned for a moment, then stand and stagger into their hives like drunks coming home from an overnight binge.

Some of his neighbors think Bridges is nutty, Old Dave sitting out there for hours just watching his bees. But nobody laughs when the honey starts flowing, sometime around August. It's all Bridges can do to find enough jars to keep up with the syrup oozing out of those frames. One season he jarred nineteen gallons. Nineteen gallons from only two hives. He's got friends back in Maine who refuse to believe it. But that's how everything is up here in the Arctic. So extreme. Everyone knows how cold it can get this far north—the record low for